Bad writing isn’t always a sign of a poet’s incompetence. Sometimes it seems even to be intentional. Let’s read a poem, something from the new issue of Washington Square, “Class Picture, 1954”:

I am the third one

from the left in the third row.

The girl I have been in love with

since the 5^th grade is just behind me

to the right, the one with the bangs.

The boy who pushes me down

in the playground sometimes

is in the top row, the last one on the left.

And my friend Paul is the second one

in the second row, the one

with his collar sticking out, next to the teacher.

But that’s not all—

if you look closely you can see

our house in the background

with its porch and its brick chimney

and up in the clouds

you can see the faces of my parents,

and over there, off to the side,

Superman is balancing

a green car over his head with one hand.

The first thing we notice is that this poem functions very much like a Hollywood movie or TV sitcom – each stanza will carry one & only one idea. If there is a single defining feature that characterizes the barrenness of American commercial media, that’s it! The complexity & nuances even of a Howard Stern talk show are consciously & deliberately drained away.

There have been genres of poetry that focused on a single meaning for a short unit of verse – imagism & some aspects of Objectivism come to mind – but neither composes with the kind of loose, prosoid, tho very clean, style evidenced here. It’s precisely this cleanliness of the writing that makes me think that this poetry is intentional. Yet the unit = idea phenomenon for these older modes tends very much toward the line &/or phrase. Thus, clean as it is, this is a rather bloated concept of “directness” (or however the poet thinks of it).

The reader is very much invited here to identify the narrator of the text with the poet, which tends to set off (at least for this reader) some calculations as to what grade of students is figured in the text. The second stanza lets us know that it is past the fifth grade, while the third tells us that it is still in the playground bully-victim range – seventh grade would be pushing it. Yet the distancing effect of “since the 5^th grade” makes sixth grade improbable, at least if we presume the competence of the writer. Placing it at seventh or above, though, suggests that the narrator is a particular type of pathetic figure, sort of a self-actualizing victim & a general bully magnet.

It’s a conundrum – either the poet is inept or the narrator is intended to seem a particular type of unattractive human being – but as quickly as this enters the frame, it’s passed by. Paul of the fourth stanza enters & appears to have no other function than to spread the focus of the narrating gaze beyond the simple dramas of puppy-love & school ground terror. Neither Paul nor his teacher ever do anything, in this stanza or elsewhere.

The “But” at the head of the fifth stanza now announces the drama of the poem, as though the first four strophes were no more than scene setting. There are other things visible in this photograph – the narrator’s home, the site of who knows how many psychic dramas. The first line of the sixth stanza keeps us very much grounded in the physical realm of the photograph, while the second line performs a double function – the closest moment in the entire poem to complexity. It appears, at one level, to describe the physical world, yet is revealed in the next line as the transition to a cloying sentimental cliché in a bizarrely American variation of magic realism. The last line of this stanza is so atrocious that it virtually cries out for Jeff Koons to come & give us a sculpture of the image in porcelain. Or marshmallow. Or something.

What if the atrociousness of the line is intentional? What if that’s the point of the poem in some weird fashion? It’s almost like one of those old Hollywood flicks that tells a moral tale about how violence is bad by giving us as much blood & gore as it conceivably can. If this is the case, then I don’t have a problem with the poet’s competence, but with the poet’s ethics. Or lack thereof.

The seventh stanza suggests that this might be the case, distancing itself from the almost horrific sentimentalism of the sixth with this image “over there, off to the side.” It’s Superman! Literally. Rescuing us from having to take this image of the sanctified (& by implication dead) parents of the sixth stanza too directly – as if to acknowledge that the poem is bypassing whatever real emotions it might want to call into play. Thus, the most fascinating word in this literary auto wreck is the adjective “green” that starts off the final line. Its specificity argues for a return to the real while at the same moment placing the image entirely into a comic book landscape.* The entire stanza is really an escape from the possibility of grief suggested by the placement of the parents faces into the clouds. It’s as though the poem wants to point to the emotion, but doesn’t want to “own” it.

A different kind of reader might suggest a correlation between the bullied presence of the pathetic figure in the early stanzas & a narrator unable to acknowledge emotion later in the text, but this would be the critical equivalent of putting a bow tie on a pig. What is more telling is that it is apparent that this poem is not incompetent, or is incompetent only insofar as it tells us some very unattractive things about the author that he may not have intended to give away. The poet, by the way, is Billy Collins, whose name appears at the head of the list of contributing “heavies” on the issue’s peach-colored cover, right above Rick Moody and Amy Gerstler.

This is the kind of poetry that often makes post-avant poets livid with fury that anyone capable of signing their own name would take it seriously, as if there were a conspiracy to offer awards, trade publication and recognition only to the most vile of human instincts. But just as there are human beings who see in George W. Bush a plain-speaking compassionate man who had demonstrated great inner strength confronting the terrors of the world, there is an audience for this kind of literature as well, pathological though it may be. That such pathologies are so prevalent as to be institutionalized in our society – institutionalized in the political, rather than clinical, sense – is one of the more lurid phenomena about America in its Late – but never late enough – Capitalist phase. This poem, if it is read 500 years from now, will be a message to the future that our century lived in the dark ages.

Putting Collins’ name first on the cover only draws attention to Washington Square’s embarrassment in including this work at all. College literary magazines tend to fall into one of two categories. The first contains all those journals that primarily exist to print student writing, sometimes contextualized by inclusions of faculty or visiting writers – this is sometimes done well (as U.C. Berkeley’s Occident did occasionally), but more often simply presents work by writers who will never appear in print again & go onto other endeavors in their lives soon enough. The second category of college literary journal focuses on “name” writers – I’ve appeared in Washington Square I must admit – and are really intended as training in editorial skills for the student staff. These journals also are sometimes done well (as Chicago Review has done at different points in its history) but more often reveal – as here – that the next generation of New  York trade editors is apt to be every bit as wretched as the one we have now.

* The George Reeves television series Superman did not begin filming in color until the 1955 season, a year after the date posed in the poem’s title.